


Avalanche

by igrab



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types, Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan
Genre: Asexuality, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-30
Updated: 2013-08-30
Packaged: 2017-12-25 03:48:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/948279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/igrab/pseuds/igrab
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>"He'd always felt, somewhere under it all, that his kisses made her uncomfortable, and he'd just thought he was bad at it."</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Avalanche

You got me standing at the bottom of this mountain that we've made  
And the ground is shaking from all of our mistakes  
Let's leave the past, is that too much to ask?  
And where do we stand?  
Can we pull through this avalanche? 

Something was up with Annabeth.

It wasn't that she was avoiding him. Not... during the day, anyway. But he was eighteen and so was she and they were demigods, but whenever he tried to get her to spend the night in his room, she managed to wriggle out of it.

He went to Nico first, because he told Nico everything.

He sucked in that kind of sigh that meant he hated being the bearer of bad news, and Percy braced himself for the worst.

"I don't know, man. She's trying to avoid you for sure - she got locked out of her own cabin the other day and crawled in with me for the night, but she didn't say why."

Percy suppressed a hot flash of jealousy at the thought; it was stupid, anyway. Nico was gayer than rainbows, they'd been through this. "You didn't mind?"

"Fuck no." He shrugged one of his bony shoulders and smirked, his dark eyes two glittering, amused slits. "She isn't exactly winning any prizes for dangerous curves. She'd make a pretty hot guy; not my type, though."

He felt that crawling feeling in his stomach, this weird combination of revulsion and curiosity - how could Nico see another guy as being hot? What was his type? How rude would it be to ask? He'd felt it on and off with him, ever since he'd come out of the closet a year ago. _Percy? Yeah, can you stop talking about that? I'm gay._

He'd just been commenting that Piper looked pretty lonely; he hadn't realized it was the sort of thing he said a lot, or that he'd had a secret agenda. But he had, really. He just wanted Nico to be as happy as he was.

_Percy? I'm gay._

And suddenly, his whole world had turned upside down. Gay. Queer. Nico di Angelo, his best friend, his best friend who flirted with Rachel for gods' sake, was gay. Liked dudes. How did he know he liked guys? Was there someone he had his eye on? He was so full of questions, but it seemed way too personal to ask them, so Percy had just nodded and accepted it with good grace and stopped pointing out single demigod girls.

He didn't feel anywhere near comfortable enough to point out the guys. He didn't even know what Nico would've liked.

Which brought him back to the present, and Annabeth. Right. So skinny nerdy blonds were out of the question, then? He didn't know why he was so obsessed with this.

Maybe because of Annabeth, because he felt like he'd lost touch with any reason for her to like him (not that he'd ever really known why she liked him), and this new avoidance pattern was getting him pretty down about his attractiveness or lack thereof. He didn't have any idea what kind of guy would be attractive. Yeah, maybe that was why he was so keen on figuring Nico out.

He huffed out a long sigh. "She's fine as long as beds aren't involved. Or sleeping. Or things we might possibly be doing instead of sleeping." He said that last sentence with trepidation, knowing it was the most likely source of their tension and not at all willing to admit it.

Nico wet his lips, which Percy could see out of the corner of his eye - flash of pink tongue against dark skin, and he really must be losing it if he noticed that kind of shit. Fuck, he and Annabeth hadn't even gone beyond kissing. Lots of kissing, but nothing more. Nico chuckled low and light, and yeah. It was getting to him. Big time.

"Look, why don't you just ask her?"

Percy gave him a look that said _Do you remember who we're talking about here?_ And Nico shot one right back, _Well, duh, and she'll forgive you for being blunt about it._ Which was the truth. Painful, but the truth.

Percy sighed. "What if she just doesn't want me?"

There was that look again. That dark look, coy and intimate, and suddenly Percy felt his palms go a little hot. "If she doesn't want you, it's nothing to do with _you_."

He didn't get it. How could it not have something to do with him? But that look Nico was giving him, like he knew all his secrets but somehow wanted to know more, made the coils in his stomach turn over and over and sometimes, it was pretty weird, having the son of a death god for your best friend.

•

Percy would've been the first person to call himself a coward. Probably the only one, given his reputation, especially at Camp Jupiter, but he knew the truth. Fighting monsters was easy when you were invincible. Talking to your girlfriend? Nothing in the world could make him feel any less terrified about that.

But he did it anyway. Because it was driving him crazy, and the night after that talk with Nico, when he hadn't even tried to make her stay and she'd slipped out before midnight like she had a date with her fairy godmother, he rolled over on twisted sheets and resigned himself to his right hand, again. 

Clearly he was going nuts about this, because he thought about Nico.

He'd always had a thing for bones - hipbones, collarbones, jawbones, all the delicate little joints in skinny hands. Nico had such fucking gorgeous hands. That wasn't news. It was news to jack off to his best friend's equally sharp smirk, and the harsh jut of his wrists, and the look in his eyes when Percy had admitted to feeling unwanted.

He spilled over his hand to the sound of Nico's darkest chuckle, and sighed.

He needed to talk to Annabeth.

•

They were sitting in Their Spot, at the lakeshore, even though it was frozen over, and Annabeth was several feet away with her giant sketchbook propped on her knees and her collection of mighty drafting pencils at her beck and call. Percy was playing with frosty blades of grass. This was exactly what their relationship was like, he realized, all the time - Annabeth, apart, doing something meaningful, and Percy dicking around, waiting for her to notice him.

"Hey, Annabeth."

It was a start. She took a second to look up, but when she did, the look on his face must've surprised her, because she didn't turn back. "Yeah?"

He looked down; couldn't meet her eyes. Pulled up another few blades of grass. "Why don't you want to spend the night with me?" he asked quietly.

There was no use pretending she wasn't doing it on purpose; he knew that and she knew that and it would've just been pointless. So the silence stretched out, twining between them, as Annabeth scrolled through the words she could say to him, to pick it out in a way that wouldn't hurt.

He let her. He knew he going to be let down; he welcomed anything that made it easier.

"It's not you," she finally whispered, echoing what Nico had said. "Really, Percy. It isn't. It's..." she tugged on her lumpy gray eraser, like it could pull the words out of her mouth for her. "...I don't like sex," she finally said, her face hidden in her hair, her body curled up and defensive. 

Don't... like sex. Percy frowned, trying to get a handle on that statement. "...What?"

"I don't like sex, Percy." She swallowed and dug her fingernails into the eraser. "I don't... mind kissing, but every time I think about going further, it just feels wrong. Gross. Not just with you, with anyone. I don't - the thought of anyone touching me that way, it's just. Weird and uncomfortable and wrong and I thought maybe it was something to do with my mom, but my sisters are okay with it, even if it's not their favorite activity, so I don't know I just--"

"Annabeth." Percy leaned forward, scooted through the chilly grass and pushed her hair away from her face. "It's fine, okay? It's fine. I can't understand, not really, but it's okay."

"Asexual," she whispered, still looking terrified but also kind of relieved, and Percy didn't know how he felt at all. "That's, you know. The word for it." Of course there was a word for it, and of course Annabeth knew what it was. It went in one ear and right out the other.

"So, um." Well, this was awkward. He didn't want to make her do anything she didn't want to do, of course. But, well. Well.

"...I'm sorry I didn't tell you sooner," she continued, though, freeing him from his awkward question. "It was - I didn't want to lose you. I like loving you, Percy, I really do."

"And everyone likes being loved. I know." He stroked her cheek and felt, oddly, the same way he did when Nico brought up the gay thing - only this time, he wasn't even sure he wanted to know more. He just wanted to know what it was okay for him to do and not to do. That was it. "But, um."

"Yeah," she whispered, leaning into his touch. "I don't make a very good girlfriend."

He let out a long sigh of a breath and felt like crying.

"I'm sorry, Annie," he murmured, almost moving to draw her into his arms but stopping at the last second. "If I could--"

"Percy, you're a teenage boy," she cut him off with a droll smile. "Believe me, I'm not offended. We're still friends though, right?" The fear was back in her eyes, and Percy realized that that's what she'd been afraid of all along - losing him.

He didn't even have to think once, let alone twice. "Of _course_."

•

The thing was, being Annabeth's friend was almost exactly like being her boyfriend. They still did everything together, still bickered and wore each other's clothes, and Percy managed to work out what was and wasn't okay for him to do. Casual touching, yes. Hugging, yes. Snuggling, yes (for which he was pathetically glad, he just liked feeling like he was protecting her), but kissing, no. And he could live with that. He'd always felt, somewhere under it all, that his kisses made her uncomfortable, and he'd just thought he was bad at it. Knowing better was a huge relief.

And then Nico showed up.

If the edge of the lake was his spot with Annabeth, the steps of the Hades cabin was his spot with Nico. He hung out there even when Nico wasn't around, just out of habit, so when a shape stepped suddenly out of his own shadow and flopped down in the snow next to him, neither was exactly surprised.

So there was no explanation for the way awareness zinged through him, or the way he suddenly couldn't stop thinking that he was single now. And it had been a year, but he still didn't know what type of guy Nico was into.

"Hey - so, what's your type, anyway?"

Nico cocked an eyebrow at him, looking surprised. "Type?"

"You know." He scuffed the toe of his sneaker in the frozen ground, and felt somewhat less nervous about asking than he thought he would. But who was he kidding, really? This was _Nico_. He was fascinated. "You said Annabeth wasn't your type; I was kind of wondering who was."

His lips tilted, up in a lazy smile, but his eyes had that look in them again, something bright and hot. "You really don't know?"

Percy fidgeted, he couldn't meet that gaze. "No idea, man. And I kind of feel like a shit friend for not asking sooner." 

Nico just laughed. Long and light, something close to a giggle, and Percy was abruptly brought back to the realization that Nico was still a big kid, under all that tough-guy stuff, and he'd probably never grow out of it. It was kind of adorable. "God, you're cute. You really want to know?"

Percy felt himself wet his lips. "I really want to know."

Nico smirked. "You."

•

It somehow wasn't until after Nico had pinned him to the wall and sucked his brains out through his cock, and after Percy had then rolled Nico to the floor and jacked him off slow, made him beg for it, that he finally said what he'd been meaning to say.

"Annabeth's asexual," he said, priding himself on being able to remember the word.

Nico huffed a laugh into Percy's shoulder. "Well, duh. Only you would stick around for a relationship that wasn't getting you laid."

He went quiet, which seemed to surprise Nico, who rose up on one elbow. "What?"

"We broke up," he said. It was... hard. He hadn't actually said it like that, in those words, in his head or out loud. It had been easy to pretend that wasn't what it was, that they were, on some level, still together - but it wasn't true. They weren't dating anymore. Percy had started thinking maybe they'd stopped a long time ago.

"Oh," Nico said, then flushed a curious kind of crimson. "Oh."

"Oh?"

"Oh," he said again, and he wouldn't meet Percy's eyes.

He thought about what that could mean. He thought about what it meant, knowing that Nico found him attractive, and he thought about what it meant, that he hadn't found anyone else all this time. He thought about this, what they'd just done, and how it was hot as hell and he wanted to do it all over again somewhere a little more comfortable. He thought about Nico's hipbones, and his eyes.

"You're not my rebound." He said it quiet and certain, and that was the truth, too. "It's kind of hard to rebound from something that probably never existed in the first place."

Nico drew in a shaky breath, then let it out on a sigh. "Wanna go break in the shower?"

Shower. Water. Naked.

"Oh, _fuck_ yes."

•

They didn't consider it official until two weeks later, when Percy showed up with a box of dark chocolate and asked him, formally. Nico, who had already begun digging through the box, frowned thoughtfully.

"Do I have to ask your mom first, or something?"

"Nah, I think she'd be okay with it. Hell, she probably knows already." Gossip had spread like wildfire through the camp. There had been surprisingly little resistance, given how popular he and Annabeth had been, but it seemed like everyone felt it was a natural resolution. Including the Iris boys. Especially the Iris boys.

"So, are you gonna say yes, or what?" Percy grinned.

Nico looked up with smears of dark chocolate on his fingers, and he smiled like the sun in return. "Of course yes. It's all I've ever wanted."


End file.
